Brain charts: mapping the rapid growth and slow decline of the brain over life

Same, but I think the reasons are more complicated.

Our body is failing. We get hungry, thirstier, and sleepier much quicker. Find a way to fix these, and you will remediate your issue.

And start taking Lion's Mane NOW.

Between 21 and 31, what changed in your life other than your age? I find that people often confuse the effects of ageing with the side effects of ageing when judging their performance in various areas of their lives.

I thought “peak brain ability” was mid to late 20s; is it earlier? Although I suppose a lot of the greatest breakthroughs in physics were done by people in their early twenties.

I’m also 31 and haven’t yet noticed a change in my ability to learn new things quickly (for some reason abstract topics like category theory seem easier to understand now than in my mid-twenties). But I know a decline is coming, and I’m really dreading that.

I will say there are a lot of confounding factors in life that cause changes that I think many people misattribute to age. As a personal example, getting married, having a kid, and taking a job at a large tech company have eaten away most of my time for creative thinking. I used to tinker away at various projects for hours on end. And while I get tired more easily now, I actually chalk this up more so to being sedentary during the pandemic than age related factors. The best marathoners in the world tend to be in their late 20s or early 30s, so I don’t think my potential to pull all-nighters has changed as much as my current physical shape.

> less driven generally

This is one thing that hasn’t changed for me. Everyone says when you get married and have kids your motivation to pursue far-out ideas drops drastically, but I haven’t noticed this at all. If anything, I find that I’m more driven now because I feel like I’m running out of time to accomplish (or at least attempt to accomplish) the main things I want to do in life. Yes, it’s a bit more of a challenge to find time, but looking back I can see where I wasted massive chunks of time in my 20s, so it’s nothing that better time management and prioritization can’t fix.

I've had the opposite mental trend. In my teenage years and early 20s my mental abilities took a dive off a cliff. Especially during my teenage years, due to other factors as well as frequently being ill.

Now that I'm in my early-30s I feel far more creative and generally have the ability to learn at my own time and pace, as opposed to having to do so in a classroom environment.

I think the problem is a lot of people tend to confuse a decline in mental ability with things like work-related burnout, a build-up of invisible stress or other compounding life factors. Rather than assuming that it's tied to age, I think it's better to try and assess other factors that you might be ignoring or simply haven't thought of in a while.

A side effect of growing wisdom and your ability of predicting how world and other people move is that you tend to get to the point, taking shortcut and skip all the less meaningful details. This might be related to why you felt less driven to put effort on trying things, especially those require tedious attention as you feel you've already known what it would be.

This definitely have something to do with how the brain is wired after years of experiencing and learning. Not necessarily a result of aging.

> The most common is a slow hardening of one’s opinions and perceptions that I consider a form of mental decline. These people are often susceptible to propaganda and conspiracy.

Maybe similar to people who always do the same exercise to keep in shape, and over time their body optimizes for that exact training so it becomes less effective, I wouldn't be surprised if our opinions become hardened because we thought the same patterns over and over.

But old people falling into propaganda and conspiracy theories? I have no other explanation for that besides mental decline. Younger people fall for those too, but many of them don't have the best mental condition to begin with.

Could you please post the article here you've mentioned if you'll find it?

Curiosity is a trait and belief, absolutely independent of aging. As the saying, the more you know the more you know what you don't know.

However, gaining the ability of being curiosity is something only can be trained in young age.

There is a huge propaganda against boomer going on right now, as the youth joked, covid is the boomer remover. However, contrary to the claim, it's not a biological difference rather a result of generational ideology. People like Steve Jobs however few, despite age as a boomer many would agree he's still a way smarter and innovative person than most millennium.

What's really driving the anti-boomer movement is the wealth gap in society. Let's say just leave to it if you don't want to dig it.

This is quite an off-topic take. This paper is about mapping gray and white matter development and change across the natural lifespan.

I don’t think these are exclusive options.

I think it depends on a lot of factors and can’t say whether I’d like a shorter “peak” life.

I think it’s difficult to measure peak until after we’ve reached it. And I would bet my life, or the life of others, on it.

That’s been the main focus of most research I’ve seen in headlines[0], and indeed the important difference between “eternal life” and “eternal youth” has been something people have understood since Gilgamesh, circa 2100 BC.

[0] not being a researcher I don’t know how do a literature study to see what the actual study focus has been

Keeping a person healthier is to live a longer life. There's no way to get around that.

Oh, thanks for the spoiler! (J/K) I wasn't going to click through --I'm 58. :-(

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30942921 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30942502 .

(And, more tangentially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30920287 )

It's a bit sad to ponder. On the other hand, the volume of white matter is still rather close to it's maximum, even at 60 years. And probably there are also individual variations, both when it comes to the timing of the onset of the decline, and the rapidity of it.

I read about Stradivarius the other day. His "golden years", the years when the quality of his work was considered to be at it's peak, was from he was 50 until he was around 80.

The article mentions no correlation between shrinking volume and its effects on intelligence or working memory. I wouldn't jump to conclusions quite yet that you are on a doomed path to being useless by 60.

I'm always skeptical of anecdotal evidence, but the chart indicates that between the age of 25 and 41 I have a ~7% decrease in my volume. I've seen absolutely zero change in my mental abilities over that time, and at 41 I am operating at an even higher level than I ever have before in an extremely high pressure environment.

What has changed in that time? I get physically tired more easily and staying up super late can mess with me for days afterwards. I've also noticed a slight decrease in performance when it comes to high speed adrenaline sports (which is demonstrated by some gnarly injuries in the last six years). Mentally though? Nothing.

Volumetric brain researcher here. Volumetric decreases across development do not represent a singular causal process. Same for volumetric increases. Volumetric changes can reflect a number of developmental processes, often concurrently and in opposite directions. I suspect that the declines in middle adulthood are not caused by the same causes of declines in the elderly, or at different stages, or a by a different mixture of causes.

Here is an example from my own research on amygdala growth, headed by my colleague Derek Andrews, a great scientist and colleague.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35341582/

Some of that could be that they started gaming at a younger age and their brain is wired stronger for fast reflex.